Monday, May 31, 2010

The more fortunate of you may be contemplating your annual sojourn to the south of France, but for the rest of us there's no time Toulouse for architectural events in Chicago for June. It all starts out Tuesday, with Pecha Kucha Volume 14, also the location of AIA Chicago's First Tuesday's Happy Hour, followed by VOA's new Roosevelt U Tower at CAF on Wednesday, with John Edel discussing agroponics in old factory buildings for Urban Habitat Chicago that evening. On Thursday, there's Archeworks daylong seminar Infrastructures for Change, Preservation Chicago's Jonathan Fine at the Cultural Center for Friends of Downtown at lunch time. This year's Excellence in Structure Engineering Awards revealed at the Structural Engineers Association of Illinois annual banquet at the John B. Murphy Auditorium on Saturday, going up against two hour musique concrète performance by Lionel Marchetti especially designed for the Graham Foundation's Madlener House ballroom. And there are five more events just this week.

On the 10th, At Home: The British Invasion! with be considered by a panel at CAF, where there will also be a remembrance of Bruce Graham with Lucien Lagrange, Franz Schulze and Richard F. Tomlinson on the 17th. Principals from Architectuuer Lokall discuss Architecture and Policy in the Netherlands at AIA Chicago on the 14th. Glessner House museum offers its annual tour of the mansions of Prairie Avenue on Sunday, the 13th. Keith Bringe of the Chicago Art Deco Society delivers this months Landmarks Illinois Preservation Snapshots lecture at the Cultural Center on the 17th, and Carol Ross Barney discusses her work on the Chicago Riverwalk at AIA on the 23rd. The Open Hand Studio brings architects and designers together with community non-profits in a June 29th Meet and Match.

Summer reading? We got books and authors coming out of our ears. Samuel Roche and Aric Lasher discuss their Plans of Chicago at CAF lunchtime on the 9th, where the following week on 16th, Mary Beth Raycraft discusses his translation of Madame Léon Grandin's A Parisienne Discovers Chicago: Impressions of the City and the World’s Columbian Exposition. OWP/P Cannon Design's Kerry Leonard talks about The Third Teacher: 79 Ways You Can Use Design tojavascript:void(0) Transform Teaching & Learning at AIA Chicago on the 18th. And at CAF's June 23rd lunchtime lecture, Chicago Bauhaus & Beyond's Gary Gand lectures on Julius Shulman: Chicago Mid-Century Commission, a book of photographs the group commissioned for what would be the legendary photographer's final book project.

Soon it will officially be summer, and things will begin winding down. But for now, there's nearly 50 events to choose from on the June calendar. Check them all out here.

Saturday, May 29, 2010

OK, so we finished congratulating ourselves on Daniel Burnham's 1909 Plan of Chicago with the close of last year's centennial celebration. Where do we go from here? Chicago's alternative design school Archeworks is looking to find at least some of the answers this coming Thursday, June 3rd, with their day-log Infrastructures for Change Symposium at the CMAP offices in the Willis Tower, co-sponsored by the Metropolitan Planning Council and Openlands.

The symposium "will be structured around three urban challenges facing Chicago and cities everywhere in the 21st Century: shrinking economies, health crises, and ecological security." The focus is on the region's greatest natural resource: the water of the great lakes. The goal is to "initiate a new blueprint for action toward imagining and inventing a 21st Century Great Lakes Model for global city building," with three panels:

The day will begin with a keynote address from Cameron Davis, Senior Advisor to the U.S Environmental Protection Agency, active in the Obama Administration’s Great Lakes Restoration Initiative. Proceedings are scheduled to published with the support of the Graham Foundation.

Information about the symposium, including bio's of all 16 speakers and participants, here. Early registration ($75.00) has been extended through June 1st, and you can register here.

Archeworks co-directors Martin Felsen and Sarah Dunn know their water. As principals of one of Chicago's most innovative architectural firms, UrbanLab, their Eco Boulevards concept won the History Channel's 2006 City of the Future Competition. Their Growing Energy/Water: Using the Grid to Get Off the Grid, co-developed with Archeworks, won the $100,000 Latrobe Prize from AIA for the most innovative research project of the past two years. And this week is shaping up as a busy one for the team. Not only is there the Thursday symposium, but on Tuesday, the winner of the $100,000 2010 Buckminster Fuller Challenge will be announced, in which UrbanLab's Growing Water has been named one of six finalists.

And if that's not enough, Archeworks is also going to this year's Venice Biennale. They're one of a team of seven participants creating, for Atlanta's High Museum, the exhibition Workshopping: An American Model of Architectural Practice, which "explores the role of the trans-disciplinary collaborations in architecture, spotlighting seven architecture projects with a focus on research and social engagement." This year's Venice Biennale opens August 29 and runs through November 21. The watery city, perpetually threatened with being swallowed up in the sea, should be a natural setting for Felsen, Dunn, Archeworks and their whole aquatically obsessed crew.

Tuesday, May 25, 2010

Monday night saw the first of four meetings held by the Chicago Park District to solicit ideas for the renovation of North Grant Park, which includes the Daley Bicentennial Plaza site into which the Daley administration is hell-bent on cramming an illegal building for the Chicago Children's Museum.

The scope of the community input was immediately sharply curtailed by rules laid down by Chicago Park District director of planning and development Gia Biagi:

1. The entire park must be destroyed because the underlying parking garage is having leakage problems and the only way to fix it is to remove every vestige of the current park. This is another example of how private/public partnerships designed to benefit the city in fact cede control of the public sector to private interests. Chicago has already lost control of its streets through the parking meter deal. Now a public amenity - a 30 acre park - has to be destroyed to appease the needs of the private owners of the garage underneath.2. It must be assumed that the Children's Museum will be built. This despite fundraising for the new building, which is now estimate to cost upwards of $150,000,000, has basically ground to a halt. The bad economy, not inaccurately, is cited by museum officials, but fundraising has undoubtedly also been depressed by the fact that it will have to take place in an environment where corporations will find their contributions won't automatically buy them friends among the general public, but may, indeed, tarnish their reputation among those who oppose the museum - which in all independent polls includes a large majority of Chicago residents. A large number of enraged activists which will make sure such contributions are widely publicized.

One good move is the Park District's hiring of renowned landscape architects Michael Valkenburgh Associates to design the replacement park. From their presentation, it is clear that they get it. They understand, as Grant Park Advisory President Bob O'Neill does not, that parks that are more than just cramming in as much programs and buildings as possible. Unfortunately the video I offer her - shot in my patented combination of horrific camerawork and hacksaw editing - covers only the beginning of Valkenburgh's excellent presentation. (I need to get a bigger storage card - or a Canon Ti,) You can see a portfolio of their work here.

Valkenburgh's presentations can also be heard as the three remaining Park District community input sessions, which was worth attending:

It's interesting that when Valkenburgh, in his presentation, said, "We're thinking that North Grant Park wants to have some of it quieter areas that are more pastoral." the room burst into spontaneous applause. "Did somebody write that down, please?" Valkenburgh quipped in reaction. Let's hope they did.

And at 7 p.m., at the Spertus Institute, there will the first of a series of public hearings for the North Grant Park Renovation Project, aka jamming a children's museum into Grant Park. Michael Van Valkenburgh Associates will unveil the latest designs for the site. According to Crain's Greg Hinz, fund-raising for the museum, which has negotiated a short-term renewal of its lease at Navy Pier, continues to go nowhere. "So how can you develop, "says Hinz, "a plan when perhaps the largest element in it is uncertain? Just asking."

Sunday, May 23, 2010

Is that the slight hint of a smile I see on the face of the statue of savior-of-the-Mexican-Republic Benito Juárez? On Saturday, 42nd ward alderman Brendan Reilly announced via his weekly newsletter that reconstruction of the Plaza of the Americas, where the statue makes its home, will begin on Monday.

(photo courtesy Brendan Reilly, Phil Levin, GNMAA)

Reilly takes credit for negotiating "the final terms of a $750,000 public-private agreement for the reconstruction project and on-going maintenance of the plaza," which is on Michigan Avenue, above Hubbard Street. Co-signatories to the agreement are the Chicago Department of Transportation and National Association of Realtors, whose headquarters building forms the plaza's northern border.

The alderman says the project, which is to include structural repairs, resurfacing, improved lighting, new landscaping, and restoration of the plaza's fountain, "will be completed at no cost to Chicago taxpayers. Because we have confirmed NAR is legally responsible for the condition of the Plaza, the Alderman focused his efforts on holding NAR to their obligations and working to foster a partnership with them moving forward. Alderman Reilly is grateful to NAR for taking ownership of this project and committing $750,000 to cover all of the above-mentioned work. "

A long-closed walkway that reaches from the western end of the plaza and extends all the way to Wabash appears to have completed, awaiting only the the bureaucrats swarming to take the credit at its re-opening.Now let's hope Alderman Reilly can now work his magic on the even more decrepit plaza next door, between the Wrigley Building and Wrigley Annex.

I would argue that its repair is even more essential. The Plaza of the Americas leads to the spiky narrow walkway pictured above. The Wrigley Plaza, in contrast, is the Mag Mile gateway at the end of what is now one of Chicago's grandest promenades, stretching all the way back to Marina City and Mies's IBM Building. It's where pedestrians reach the perimeter of the magnificent new Trump River Walk, only to be dumped into a dark slum of a covered-over fountain and deadly gray concrete that lies between the elegant terra cotta of the two Wrigleys stinking like a dead mackerel.Earlier this month, the Trib's Blair Kamin had an excellent piece contrasting the Trump and the Wrigley, and revealed that - surprise, surprise - the plaza is actually owned by the city, which is responsible for, and has clearly all but abandoned, its maintenance. Two days later Kamin reported CDOT has "begun discussions" with Wrigley about improvements. Kamin quoted CDOT spokesman Brian Steele as adding "no firm plan, timetable or funding sources are set."

How encouraging. It sounds like the kind of statement bureaucrats make to bid time until everyone forgets about the problem, making it go away. William Wrigley is no longer a Chicago company. Two years ago, global candy and gum powerhouse Mars bought it for $23 billion. Wrigley was traditionally a major philanthropic presence in its home city. Mars has been invisible. If it has any interest in not being typecast as a neglectful absentee landlord, this would be a good time to step up to the plate.

Today is the closing day for this weekend's showing of the latest work by artist Lora Delestowicz-Wierzbowski, whose murals include From Sea to Shining Sea, commissioned for what's billed as the world's largest truckstop, along Iowa 80. Today's showing will include the in-progress mural that she is painting for a Joplin Missouri Truck Stop. The show concludes Sunday, May 23rd, from noon to 5:00 Bridgeport Art Center/East Bank Storage; 35th and Racine, 4th floor.

Thursday, May 20, 2010

Walking down Washington this week, I noticed this lovely private garden atop the beleaguered and largely empty Block 37 mall on State Street. There is not a square inch of public greenspace in the Block 37 development. This is what the public gets:This is the entrance to the Washington Red Line station, which has been "temporarily" closed since 2006 for construction of the pedway under Block 37. The pedway opened last November; the station remains shuttered. All that's left is this scarring, incomprehensible ugliness, put on public display.

Exactly what could the purpose of this noxious, unfinished concrete block bisecting an already narrow stair except, perhaps, to let the bureaucrats give the bird to the passerbys? It's like the entrance to King Tut's tomb, the sealed route to a burial chamber holding a quarter billion dollars of taxpayer's money, squandered on a "superstation" for an express service to O'Hare that doesn't exist and for which there was never a plan to make it exist. Construction was halted and the station sealed after officials conceded that the project was massively overbudget and no one had any idea how much more cash would have to be dumped into the pit to make it usable.

And it's the gift that keeps on giving. Every year there's $5 to $10 million in debt service payments on the bonds the CTA floated for a station that may well never open. Anywhere else, it's the kind of the scandal that would have driven a mayor from power. In Chicago, the city of sheep, it's business as usual.

The only visible remnant of the fiasco is this stairway. Call it the TIF memorial.

Tuesday, May 18, 2010

Four years ago, veteran character actor Harris Yulin, whose truly terrifying death scene in Arthur Penn's 1975 film Night Moves I've never been quite able to shake, was at the Goodman in Chicago to play Louis Sullivan in Richard Nelson's Frank's Home. The playwright's Sullivan was a closeted gay man, a desperate, drunken has-been, traveling to California to beg the play's central character, Peter Weller's Frank Lloyd Wright, for a job. Yulin, a big bear of a guy, had little in common with Sullivan physically, but his skill has actor created a grounded, recognizable human being with far more depth than Nelson's writing of the part had provided.

There was, I believe, some talk that Yulin actually wanted to do a play about Sullivan, and while that didn't happen, he's turned recidivist - architect-wise - and is currently appearing off-Broadway as Mies van der Rohe in the June Finfer play, The Glass House, about the creation of Farnsworth House, Mies's modernist masterpiece in Plano, Illinois.

The only review I've come across so far describes Yulin's performance as bringing "an excellently calibrated mix of egoism and humanity to van der Rohe . . . there's a courtliness to the actor's portrayal, as well, that makes van der Rohe more likeable than he might have been in other, coarser hands." As in life, Finfer mixes in Edith Farnsworth and Philip Johnson. Complications ensue.

A production of the Resonance Ensemble, The Glass House is running in repertory with another play having an architect, Halvard Solness, as its lead: Henrik Ibsen's The Master Builder, although, unlike Solness, Mies never, to the best of my knowledge, fell off one of his own towers. The two plays run through June 5th at the Harold Clurman Theatre on 42nd, and the tickets are dirt cheap ($18.00!) I doubt I'll be getting to New York, but if you do, please send me your comments if you see either play.

A number of evenings also include post-performance talks by such luminaries as MOMA's Barry Bergdoll on the 20th, New Yorker critic Paul Goldberger on the 26th, SAH President Dietrich Neumann on the 28th, and a tag team of Philip Johnson Glass House Executive Director Christy MacLear and Farnsworth House Executive Director Whitney French on June 1.

As to Harris Yulin, where does he go from here? Unconfirmed reports have him next shaving his head to play global stararchitect Rem Koolhaas in Zhang Yimou's production of Duncan Sheik's rumored seriocomic opera, Put Down Those Fireworks!

Snøhetta: architecture - landscape - interior- Thursday, May 20th from 5:00 to 7:00 p.m., Crown Hall, IIT. The opening reception for an exhibition of the work of Oslo/New York architectural firm Snøhetta, whose work includes the recently completed Oslo Opera House, pictured here, which will run through June 4th, Monday through Friday, 9:00 a.m., to 5:00 p.m. The following Tuesday, May 25th, Snøhetta Senior Partner Craig Dykers will give a 12:00 p.m. lecture in Room 14 at Crown Hall.Also this week. on Tuesday, the 18th, from 6:00 to 8:00 p.m.,, Unity Temple celebrates the restoration of the south roof slab at Frank Lloyd Wright's Oak Park masterpiece. And on Thursday, the 20th, at a Landmarks Illinois Preservation Snapshots lecture at 12:15 p.m. in the Claudia Cassidy Theater at the Chicago Cultural Center, City of Chicago Cultural Historian Tim Samuelson will lecture on Louis Sullivan's Idea, a preview of the eagerly awaited Samuelson/Chris Ware exhibition of the same name opening June 26th.

There are sixteen great events just this week, and nearly 30 still left in May. Check all the great stuff on the May calendar here.

We'll have more about this later, but for now, we'll tell you that a team lead by architect and UIC professor Alexander Lehnerer won first prize in the Chicago Architectural Club's Mine the Gap competition for ideas on what to do with the hole left behind by the collapse of the proposal t0 build a Santiago Calatrava designed Chicago Spire. Here's a report from Fox News.

Friday, May 14, 2010

On Friday, the Michigan Avenue Bridge, a key component of the Burnham plan that pushed development north of the river and created the Magnificent Mile, turned 90, with a small celebration at the McCormick Bridgehouse and Chicago River Museum, captured here in a photograph by our indefatigable correspondent Bob Johnson. Bob was also on hand to snap one of this year's CANstructions, on display in the first floor lobby of Merchandise Mart through June 2nd, after which all the food will be donated to the Greater Chicago Food Depository. There are also barrels in which you can drop your own canned food contributions when you visit the exhibition.

Thursday, May 13, 2010

OK, on one level, this is a bit of shameless self-promotion, as I was lucky enough to serve on a jury with such great people as Jeanne Gang, Martin Felsen, Anthony Wood and Robert Somol judging the Chicago Architectural Club's Mine the Gap competition for ideas of what to do with the massive hole that is all that survives of the idea of building a 2,000 foot Chicago Spire, designed by Santiago Calatrava, that would have been the tallest occupied structure in North America.

On the other hand, however, there were well over 100 entries, from all over the world, and I can tell you quite objectively there's a wealth of great stuff. The winners will be announced on Saturday, the 15th, at a 12:00 p.m. event beginning with the jury talking about the competition and the work - you might even get to hear me justifying my advocacy of the entry with the quiet red stopper - followed by the opening of the exhibition.

The exhibition will give you a chance to see not only the winners, but a large selection of some of the most interesting other submissions, as well. The show will run only one week, May 15-21, from 11:30 a.m. to 5:30 p.m., at the John David Mooney Foundation, 114 West Kinzie.

Tuesday, May 11, 2010

On Thursday, June 3rd, Ross Barney Architects will be offering a special preview, for "architects, artists and designers", of Painted Violins, 34 violins transformed into artworks by an array of the city's leading artists, architects, and designers. The pieces are going to be sold off in a June 24th live auction benefiting the Chicago Symphony, which will also include cocktails, live entertainment and a silent auction.

Ross Barney's own contribution, Pizzicato #1, is a witty amalgam of a violin and Chicago's iconic Picasso Statue (minus the Blackhawks cap). There's also Mono-Chromatic from Studio/Gang, Rhapsody, from Nicolae Ceausescu's former official portrait painter (reformed), Alexandra Darida, and Terry Karpowicz's oxidized Sonata in the Age of Iron. Rose Frantzen says of her Violin No. 1, that "I was divided on painting the violin because I found the wood so beautiful-- so I started in a direction with the charcoal and opted to leave it."

On the other hand, Robert Engel transforms his violin into a tin-man extravaganza in Robot Rhapsody, and John Himmelfarb, in his Double Cadenza, dismembers his into two neat halves, the bottom of which serves as a brush pot. Donna Lapietra's sleek, ebony iViolin rather dispiritedly replaces the strings with an embedded iPod. There are also contributions from artists such as Nick Cave, Mr. Imagination, Mark Campbell, Ann Ponce, the Zhou Brothers, and more.

See the entire gallery here. Download a bid form here. Bids must be received by June 24th.

The Thursday, June 3rd event at Ross Barney Architects is from 5:30 to 7:30 p.m., with music by Loredo Salazar. RSVP to Peg McCarron via email.

Sunday, May 09, 2010

Once again we're atoning for our oversights: we've got four great new events to add to the May calendar.

On Thursday, the 13th, it's the 4th annual ACANemy awards for CANstruction 2010 in which teams from Gensler, Alfred Benesch, Wiss, Janney, Elster, Nagle Hartray and 11 others compete to create structures entirely out of metal cans of foods that will be contributed to the Greater Chicago Food Depository after being on display at the Merchandise Mart through June 1st, where the judging and awards reception will take place 6 to 8:30 p.m.

On Friday, the 14th, the McCormick Bridgehouse & Chicago River Museum will be celebrating the 90th anniversary of the Michigan Avenue bridge, with speeches, special tours, and a cake from Swedish Baker. With the spectacular sculptures by James Earle Fraser and Henry Hering, Bridge Mich doesn't look a day over thirty (although I've heard she's had a lot of work done.)

Friday evening, there'll be another major event, when Chicago cultural historian Tim Samuelson lectures on and at Louis Sullivan's Holy Trinity Church, at 7:00 p.m, in a special fundraiser for the church's restoration fund.

A week from Tuesday, on May 18th, from 6:00 to 8:00 p.m., in Oak Park, the Unity Temple Restoration Foundation will be celebrating the restoration of the south roof slab of Frank Lloyd Wright's masterpiece which, entering its second century, is undergoing an extensive - and expensive - repair and restoration. There will be food, wine, tours and updates, and a chance to make your contribution to securing this world-class building for future generations.

Also this week, there's a lecture on White House Interior, 1865 - 1902 at Glessner House on Tuesday, Martin Felsen on their Growing Water concept at AIA Chicago, Gordon Gill giving a lunchtime lecture on Smith+Gill's Chicago Decarbonization Plan at CAF, and Preservation Chicago's Drinking in Your History fundraiser at the Green Door - all on Wednesday.

There are over 40 great events still to come this month. Check them all out on the May calendar of Architectural Events here.

About Me

. . . writings on architecture have appeared in the Chicago Reader, Metropolis Magazine, the Harvard Design Magazine, and the backs of discarded gum wrappers.
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